After the Kiss Read Free

was full of twisting paths and unexpected steps, and houses constructed from the stones of the ruins, giving the buildings an aged, almost pallid appearance.
    It was, as Samuel had told her, an inward looking place. The villagers were content enough to build the clocks for which they were famed and ignore the world. It was because of her friend that she was here at all. Samuel had been born in the village and knew the squire from which she rented her small cottage.
    Penelope stood, emptied the contents of the bowl into the stew over the fire. Their main meal of the day had not contained meat for weeks, but they were never short of onions. Margaret was beginning to detest the smell and taste of them.
    “I have never read the third volume,” Margaret said in her own defense. “He writes most compellingly about the Orient, Penelope.”
    Penelope turned and looked at her, one eyebrow rising. A perfect chastisement, Margaret thought. She could not have done better with her students.
    Another change in her life. She had begun teaching a few girls from the village over the last year. Doing so had given her an opportunity to use those lessons her Gran had taught her.
    She would never have children of her own; that fact had been proven during her five-year marriage to Jerome. But three mornings a week, seven little girls ranging from five to ten years of age came to her cottage. For those hours, she thought not about her precarious financial situation, nor of her loneliness, but of each girl’s talents and needs. Annie’s enthusiasm for learning was delightful, as was the way Dorothy was advancing in her reading. She answered their questions and smiled at their laughter.
    In turn, she learned from her students. On their walks she’d been shown how to listen for the grouse, or watch a new moon in order to predict the growing season. Margaret had stood in a meadow as she’d been instructed by seven excited voices, concentrating upon the clouds and feeling small and insignificant beneath the bowl of sky. Had she’d ever truly seen the sky in London?
    It was, after all, a satisfactory life. One that would be remarkably content but for two things—her loneliness and the fact that she was nearly desperate for money.
    She glanced down at the book on the table again. The painter had been an artist of some talent. Her fingers trailed across the illustration of muscled shoulders, down a tapering back and over the length and breadth of one thigh. This man appeared in numerous small illustrations sprinkled throughout the Journals of Augustin X . In each of them he had been proudly naked, involved in some sensual and surely forbidden act. His shoulders were broad, his back tapering to his waist. His buttocks were perfectly formed as if to coax a palm to curve around both of them. A stranger, possibly a figment of the artist’s imagination. Yet she knew him more intimately than she had known her husband.
    But even more shocking than the paintings was her own unfettered imagination. Too many times she’d envisioned herself as the woman in his arms. Surfeited with pleasure, languid with the memory of it. Her eyes holding secrets and promising lessons, her smile curved in pure, unalloyed joy.
    A few days after the fire she’d found the three books tucked into the bottom of the strongbox. For months, the Journals of Augustin X had remained in the small chest, untouched. But during their first winter here, bored and lonely, Margaret had extracted the first volume and begun to read it.
    Augustin had evidently been a well traveled man of leisure and some wealth. He had written, in exquisite detail, about the scenery of the lands he’d visited. Her fingers trailed over a passage.
    My journey through China began in Qinghai on the Tibetan Plateau at the Huang He River. At the place the Wei River enters the Huang He in central Shaanxi province we were treated to great hospitality. It was there I met Ming Wu and spent one of my most memorable